Watching that 180 movie, near the end, a light-bulb went off. Since Ray Comfort is the epitome of using lies, manipulation, and strawmen arguments to make people change their minds, and using the Holocaust as an anti-abortion tool, only to use this to convert people to Christianity and of course say the usual bs about God, my question is, where is the Bible scripture that claims that ALL forms of Government are personally appointed by God and is righteous and just?

Watching that 180 movie, near the end, a light-bulb went off. Since Ray Comfort is the epitome of using lies, manipulation, and strawmen arguments to make people change their minds, and using the Holocaust as an anti-abortion tool, only to use this to convert people to Christianity and of course say the usual bs about God, my question is, where is the Bible scripture that claims that ALL forms of Government are personally appointed by God and is righteous and just?

Peter 2:13-23

Romans 13:1-4

Precisely what I needed! Much respect here towards you!

Reading the Bible Scriptures, because it literally says exactly what I said in terms of message. If Ray really wishes to attack a "Modern Day" Holocaust, he should really attack the food industry, especially the meat and poultry. A great place to start on that would be the farm that McDondald's and Target dropped due to the horrific, unwarranted animal abuse. Then again, he won't do a damn thing about that all because he thinks in his own delusional world that existence revolves around humans, and human beings only. I'll be surprised if he is actually a vegetarian.

I ask something similar to this to a pastor who was adamantly against abortions, he reply that it was that the people that gave the abortion to the girl who became sick or died should receive the death penalty and stay in jail for the rest of their lives. But of course when I pressed for an answer to the girl getting punished for it he said that she should not because if the temptation was not there she would not of pursued it. I thought this was no where near a good idea because that would allow criminals to say the same thing. "Well they left their wallet in their console of their car, so they should get put in jail for tempting me" So of course he did not have an answer.

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When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”--- Sinclair Lewis

I believe there is something out there watching over us. Unfortunately, it's the government.

I ask something similar to this to a pastor who was adamantly against abortions, he reply that it was that the people that gave the abortion to the girl who became sick or died should receive the death penalty and stay in jail for the rest of their lives. But of course when I pressed for an answer to the girl getting punished for it he said that she should not because if the temptation was not there she would not of pursued it. I thought this was no where near a good idea because that would allow criminals to say the same thing. "Well they left their wallet in their console of their car, so they should get put in jail for tempting me" So of course he did not have an answer.

The flaw that he's overlooking is that girls will still get the abortion. Abortion isn't some horror of the new world. Women have been doing it since the start of human history. It's just now we're actually talking about it and doing it publicly. Those same girls will just get abortions in back alleys by questionable doctors or shady substances. It's not like removing the doctors from the equation is going to stop it. Not having doctors around never actually prevented it before.

Besides the doctors are only helping their patients. As you pointed out, it's the patients who are making the decision.

So in other words he doesn't want to punish the people that actually get an abortion. He just wants to punish the people that are trying to make it safe.

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"I drank what?!"- Socrates

"Dying for something when you know you'll be resurrected is not a sacrifice.It's a parlour trick."- an aquaintance

Philip of Macedon: (via messenger) If we enter Sparta, we will raze all your buildings and ravage all your women.Spartan Reply: If.

I ask something similar to this to a pastor who was adamantly against abortions, he reply that it was that the people that gave the abortion to the girl who became sick or died should receive the death penalty and stay in jail for the rest of their lives. But of course when I pressed for an answer to the girl getting punished for it he said that she should not because if the temptation was not there she would not of pursued it. I thought this was no where near a good idea because that would allow criminals to say the same thing. "Well they left their wallet in their console of their car, so they should get put in jail for tempting me" So of course he did not have an answer.

Blah-dee-blah-dee-blah. It never ceases to amaze me how much pro-lifers dance around all this stuff.

The simple fact of the matter is, if life begins at conception, then abortion is premeditated homicide on the part of both the girl/woman getting the abortion and the doctor who is performing it, meaning that -- in most jurisdictions in America, anyway, which is the only legal system I'm really familiar with -- they should both be prosecuted for murder in the first degree and receive the sentence legislated for same, which is most commonly 25 years to life.

I have yet to meet a pro-lifer who is willing to concede the logic of that, however, which to me suggests that -- as with so many other of their religious and religiously-based convictions -- they harbor serious doubts that they try to keep hidden deep down inside from others. And even from themselves, for that matter.

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[On how kangaroos could have gotten back to Australia after the flood]: Don't kangaroos skip along the surface of the water? --Kenn

Abortion is already illegal in some countries-- your friend should look at the maternal mortality stats on those places (mainly Catholic Latin American) and see if he would be willing to accept such a price in exchange for feeling nice and moral.

Because the fact is, when abortion is illegal women die (along with the fetus) because as has been said before, they will still have abortions. Only the back-alley risky kind. And then the woman's other kids, her parents, her husband etc. also suffer. We have the data from Romania during the pronatalist dictatorship in the 1970's and 80's. Abortion and contraception were outlawed --meaning that poor and working class women suffered most while privileged women could get bc pills on the black market.

Women had many more pregnancies than was healthy and had more children than they could care for. The orphanages overflowed with the abandoned kids, esp. kids with disabilities. Kids were neglected and abused by the thousands. And desperate women with 8 or 10 kids had dangerous illegal abortions rather than go through another pregnancy.

Since your friend is into holocaust analogies, tell him it is a Sophie's choice. Legal abortion? Or social devastation and increased death of women and girls. Hurry up and choose![1]

BTW abortion is so hard to get in some places in the US that it may as well be illegal. IIRC there is only one clinic in all of Mississippi that performs the operations. Poor rural states need more poor women and girls having babies they can't feed-- and the social services are so generous there....

...I watched the whole thing and I just don't know where to start. If I must choose, I guess I'd start with a question that he kept asking, because I knew the answer. At least, I knew the answer if we agreed with Comfort that God exists and that the Bible is correct.

That question was: "complete this sentence: killing a baby in the womb is okay when?"

Answer 1: when God asks us to kill their mother. (Numbers 31:17).

I suppose it might be possible that there were no pregnant women among those that had "known a man" or whatever. So maybe that's not a good example.[1] Let's try this instead.

Edit: at the very least, this is an instance when it's okay to kill babies.

Answer 2: when your wife has slept with another man. (Numbers 5:11-21)

Look it up, you and the priest of your choosing[2] get to give your wife some..."bitter water" that is supposed to curse the unborn child if it's not yours. Seriously, read it.

I'm sure there are more examples. And I'm sure that some Christian will read this and tell me that I'm pulling those passages out of context or something.

In any case, Comfort is begging the question in how he frames the issue as killing a "baby" even assuming Christianity is true. He would need to first establish, on Christianity, a fetus is a baby. This might be a bit tricky though. Christian thinking on this issue has not been as clear cut as anti-abortion advocates would like us to think. For example, back in 2008, Frank K. Flinn, a writer and professor of religious studies wrote a brief essay outlining the way in which Catholic thinking on abortion has changed over the course of the Church's history.[3] In it, he demonstrates that the idea that, at conception, an individual is ensouled or that an individual is a full human is something that isn't exactly obvious Biblically and hasn't actually been the position of the Church for much of its history. And while apologists like Comfort love to draw from people like St. Thomas Aquinas when it comes to attempting to prove God's existence, Finn shows that they would do well to avoid his thinking on abortion. Aquinas believed that ensoulment does not happen at conception and that the abortion of a fetus prior to ensoulment was a sin against marriage but not murder. And really, to think otherwise results in some weird contradictions. Here's Finn:

Since Donum Vitae several Catholic moral theologians have noted that the fertilized egg at the blastosphere stage is not a physical individual until it is restricted by implantation in the wall of the uterus. This does not happen for about two weeks after fertilization. The early cell group can split into twins, etc., or split and be reabsorbed by the original set of cells. This argues for delayed ensoulment like Aristotle's. Those who uphold the immediate infusion of the soul at conception are forced into the rather irrational position of having God infuse billions of souls at conception and then immediately discarding the cells that bear them.

Also, why does Comfort think that a ban on lying is one of the 10 commandments? Bearing false witness against one's neighbor is in it. Breaking one's oath is in it.[4] But not a blanket ban on lying. And also saying something like "God damn it" is not using the Lord's name in vane. It's not even using the Lord's name. His name is Yahweh sebaot. Or one of them is, anyway.

As far as his depiction of the Nazis, I think it's nice that Comfort at least acknowledges that Hitler portrayed himself as a Christian. That's more than a lot of apologists will admit.

I think our government has done an extreme disservice to our young people. The government and doctors are seen as authority figures, and if a doctor tells you abortion is a viable option, then you are likely to think to yourself, "well if the doctor says it's okay it must be okay." They then make ignorant decisions based on what their authority figures have brought them to believe, and are actually killing their own sons and daughters, without realizing what their doing. Films like these are obviously biased, the point of this film is not to present both sides of the argument and allow you to choose, it is to shock you back into reality. It's to challenge the prior beliefs you had based on what your authorities have told you, and show you just terrible of a situation our country is in right now.

As others have pointed out, the notion that the urge to abort stems somehow from authority figures saying that the procedure is okay just betrays a complete lack of historical perspective on your friend's part. People have wanted to separate the sexual act from child birth for as long as they've known that the two were connected. As the references to Aquinas in my previous post demonstrate, people have been thinking about abortion long before Roe V Wade.

Anyway...

In conclusion, the state shouldn't be up in women's vaginas like that.

Though I do wonder what would happen if we primed some Christians with the Holocast as an example in the way Comfort did and then asked them what they would do if it was God asking them to kill prisoners.

over the centuries there have been MANY "holocausts".....maybe start by asking which one he is talking about

Specifically Hitler reign. There are others but since they aren't as well known he uses them. Thanks for all of the in-put guys, I'll be more ready to argue my case with him since you guys have brought up statistics which I didn't have on hand.

Pregnancy is a scary thing to me. I want to experience it but I comprehend how difficult it can be. The fact that a Christian male is trying to tell women what they should do with their body troubles me! He'll never have to experience the pain of childbirth, the agony *if* the women decides to disown. He'll never have to hunch over from the weight, potentially be cut open, ect.

This video has made quite a few rounds and according to my friend, converted many people to the 'pro-life' debate.

Just want to say, I watched this video, and the original statement the guy made is right. People are forgetting how bad the Holocaust actually was. Thing is, it's because in America, kids are being taught Bible Study instead of world history...

I used to be Jewish before I deconverted. Let me tell the world, in my congregation at the Holocaust memorial service every year, the sobbing 80 and 90-year-old widows, mothers, brothers, sons and daughters of the men, women and children that were killed in concentration camps were NOT lying.

What the crazy pro-lifer said has a point, if we forget history, we are going to repeat it. It's religion's fault. Hitler's Christian views were just as messed up as the pro-lifers are.

They're twisting a pointless point.

Now look at what I just posted, and see how easy it is to turn that point he made into an argument (it may be a shit one, but so is the pro-life point from the same source of Hitler). It's wrong to use something like that as an example for something totally irrelevant. Using Hitler arguments is only acceptable if you are arguing against a Holocaust denier or against the Nazi/Fascist viewpoint.

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"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."

Roe v Wade was passed in 1973. I was in high school, and beginning to think about my future. I did not want children. The stories of women dying of coat hanger abortions gave me nightmares, and I was terrified for myself. Contraception isn't perfect. I don't ever want to see those times again. In some ways it was very, very scary to be a young woman in those days.

What folks here are saying is so true. Women who don't want children will abort regardless of the law. The question is whether we want them safe and cared for, or risking bleeding to death in alleys. *shiver*

Note: I know this is an emotional and personal response. But when you're talking about what happens inside my body, that's about as personal as it can possibly get. This is not an issue that I, or many women, can discuss completely without emotion. "Keep your laws off my body" says it all.

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If we ever travel thousands of light years to a planet inhabited by intelligent life, let's just make patterns in their crops and leave.

What folks here are saying is so true. Women who don't want children will abort regardless of the law. The question is whether we want them safe and cared for, or risking bleeding to death in alleys. *shiver*

From the perspective of the folks whose motivation for banning abortion is to punish women for perceived promiscuity, this outcome isn't without appeal. And that perspective makes far more sense in the context of the other views held by the Christian right's part of the pro-life movement, than the perspective of wanting to save the unborn.

...From the perspective of the folks whose motivation for banning abortion is to punish women for perceived promiscuity...

And yet when I was married, I'd only been with my husband. No promiscuity involved. I was very lucky that our contraception never failed, because I really, really, really didn't want children. Of course I'm sure that makes me unnatural to the fundamentalists.

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If we ever travel thousands of light years to a planet inhabited by intelligent life, let's just make patterns in their crops and leave.

...From the perspective of the folks whose motivation for banning abortion is to punish women for perceived promiscuity...

And yet when I was married, I'd only been with my husband. No promiscuity involved. I was very lucky that our contraception never failed, because I really, really, really didn't want children. Of course I'm sure that makes me unnatural to the fundamentalists.

They can't seem to fathom any reason why people would not want [more] children. But they support policies that encourage abortions. Don't they realize that abortions go up under conservative administrations and down under liberal ones? If they really wanted fewer abortions they would support birth control, sex ed, family income support and universal health care. Helping gay parents adopt would also help. But they are against all of those things.

My sister's college roommate and her husband were poor, poor, poor. They never wanted kids, and were trying to be responsible people. The young wife ended up having several abortions because she got pregnant on every form of contraception they used.

What would the fundies rather have them do? Put the woman through every unwanted pregnancy like a fetus factory, even at the risk of her losing her physically demanding low-wage job, and then give the sickly underweight babies over to the state? With only one low income, they might have ended up homeless, living in their car. Is that what responsible people are supposed to do?

Keep all the unwanted kids and go on welfare? Nice life. But not even possible in today's political climate. Conservatives love to give generous welfare benefits to low-income married couples with kids.[snark]

Their jobs had no health insurance, so any health risks from the pregnancies would end up in the emergency room where they could not afford to pay the ginormous bill, or put on maxed out credit cards that they could never pay off, and would eventually be put on the taxpayer somehow. The conservatives are against universal health care, and are totally unsympathetic to the bankruptcies caused by medical bills.

Abortion is sometimes the best of a lot of not-too-great choices, and conservative anti-kid policies ironically make abortion an even better choice.

They can't seem to fathom any reason why people would not want [more] children. But they support policies that encourage abortions. Don't they realize that abortions go up under conservative administrations and down under liberal ones? If they really wanted fewer abortions they would support birth control, sex ed, family income support and universal health care. Helping gay parents adopt would also help. But they are against all of those things.

As I said in my post to Traveler, the conservative positions advocated by those in the pro-life movement make little sense in the context of a desire to protect the unborn. They make far, far more sense in the context of a desire to punish and/or oppress women.

What would the fundies rather have them do? Put the woman through every unwanted pregnancy like a fetus factory, even at the risk of her losing her physically demanding low-wage job, and then give the sickly underweight babies over to the state? With only one low income, they might have ended up homeless, living in their car. Is that what responsible people are supposed to do?

This serve the purpose I outlined quite nicely. Note that unwanted pregnancies serve that purpose far better than wanted pregnancies do. A woman who is not ready to have a child will be much more effectively oppressed by the experience than one who is ready.

Keep all the unwanted kids and go on welfare? Nice life. But not even possible in today's political climate. Conservatives love to give generous welfare benefits to low-income married couples with kids.[snark]

Their jobs had no health insurance, so any health risks from the pregnancies would end up in the emergency room where they could not afford to pay the ginormous bill, or put on maxed out credit cards that they could never pay off, and would eventually be put on the taxpayer somehow. The conservatives are against universal health care, and are totally unsympathetic to the bankruptcies caused by medical bills.

Abortion is sometimes the best of a lot of not-too-great choices, and conservative anti-kid policies ironically make abortion an even better choice.

I used to see all the time on TV (when I watched it), and read currently in the paper, people of good-standing, using such things to prop up what they're stating as a course of a mean to an end, their end. People do it all the time; and I think, in my opinion, most people are disgusted by it -- not matter what life they walk from.

-Nam

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Quote from: David Garrett Arnold

there are oceans of words aged in prayer,against geometric lines, and cloudbeaten skies;credulous allure—slowly captivated in hearts fair—trees and flowers bloomed in grace upon one's eyes.

This is an easy debate. Remind him that if he claims to be "pro-life" he is anti-god!

Seriously. Not one doctor on earth comes close to the god your Internet buddy claims to worship.Point out Jericho and Ai where his god literally tells Joshua to slay the pregnant. Those who were slain were the enemy to begin with, so those with clear-thinking minds (us, the NEW enemy), should have abortions. Heck, his god would encourage that.

Still, to me, you're not a human till about three years have passed. An infant can survive by itself?? Not every kid is Mowgli raised by thoughtful wolves, man.

« Last Edit: December 28, 2011, 12:54:44 AM by IAmFirst »

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2nd of all, if all you believe in is peer-reviewed papers, you won't go very far in life...